Is every society "woke" and intolerant? Does it have to be this way?

Recently, on a “crossover” edition of my YouTube show Haman Nature with economist Bob Murphy, we talked about how some people have recently been throwing around the term “woke right” to describe people not on the political left who are said to be acting like the woke left.

Exactly what this “woke right” term is meant to convey is a little fuzzy, but it involves ostracization and calls for “cancellation”, particularly for people critical of the Israeli government, but also those who criticize the American government.

The common thread of the “woke right” criticism (even if poorly defined), is that people on the right are emulating the shrill, denunciatory, anti free speech, anti freedom of association, “collectivist” intolerance that we have associated with the woke left for the last couple decades or so.

In that Haman Nature episode, I offered up a hypothesis: Maybe this is just how humans are, naturally. Maybe our natural tendency is to nurture and tolerate acts and ideas we like and to cast out loudly and violently acts and ideas we don’t like.

Maybe “woke intolerance” isn’t a left or right thing at all.

This idea reminded me of an episode of the Bob Murphy Show from a while back featuring economist Gene Callahan. On that show, Callahan suggested that societies that think of themselves as “tolerant” aren’t, really. No society is.

He says that societies sometimes call themselves “liberal”, but they aren’t. Instead, every society tolerates what it considers unimportant and harshly criticizes, shames, penalizes, or ostracizes acts and ideas it considers dangerously important.

This doesn’t strike me as a left-wing behavior. Very religious people (Puritans, for example) are extremely intolerant of behaviors and ideas contrary to their religious principles and dogmas. Are we to consider them “woke leftists”?

Or what about “female circumcision” as practiced in some foreign cultures? If such people moved to America, the government would surely step in and outlaw this (to me) barbaric practice. But then what about male circumcision? What about parents who want to “assist” their young children to “transition” to the opposite sex?

What does liberalism have to say about such matters? Are these prohibitions “woke”? Are they left-wing or right-wing?

The broad purpose of Haman Nature is to discover, through examinations of history, economics, cosmology, psychology, evolution, and philosophy, what we can learn about the nature of ourselves and our universe that can help us learn the proper mode of being for our species such that we can peacefully flourish and prosper in this universe we find ourselves in.

Big task, but fear not. We’ll get there.

This discussion about “wokeness” and intolerance, which seem to exist on both the left and right side of the political spectrum — which, indeed, seem to exist distinct from politics entirely — brings up a key point I talk about over and over.

Since we are prone to intolerance, and the vast array of things we have proven to be intolerant about over time and space is so contrary and capricious, it must be a mistake to entrust the power to use force against “heretics” to a monopoly government.

That’s has to be a universal rule for our species: No monopoly on political authority. Such a monopoly violates property rights and free association. Such a monopoly will (by necessity and definition) ossify into a strict authoritarianism that denies the human spirit and our continuous search for truth, meaning, and beauty.

This is a meta-rule. It doesn’t answer what is sacred and what is profane — not directly. But this rule allows humanity the freedom, flexibility, and space to discover what is sacred and profane.

Within this rule, people can make covenants and contracts to protect those actions and ideas they value, while protecting themselves from the opposite.

It’s a simple rule and one we used to understand implicitly with a few fuzzy but powerful phrases: You go your way, and I’ll go mine. It’s a free country. Mind your own business.

These phrases, and the good-natured ethic behind them, would serve us well going forward. So would dismantling the monopoly state. We don’t need one center of power in Washington DC crafting edicts for all 330 million of us to follow.

It’s unnatural.

I hope you check out both podcasts. They dive much deeper into these issues than I will in a short article. I think you’ll find them very interesting.

Naturally,

Adam